Following on the trails of the massive three-part series about structure networks, today we’ll dive into the scary depths of industry and make an attempt at explaining why it was necessary to turn it upside down. Be warned: it’s long and there is some heavy number-crunching ahead, but luckily there is a tl;dr at the end.

Mineral field and geoscanning changes

As mentioned in the first PBS blog, we’re changing the current fixed position mineral fields to random spawns, where the fields won’t get “refilled”, but new fields will appear instead, once the current ones are depleted. The change is first and foremost required due to the new terraformable gamma islands, because fixed mineral fields would interfere with the nature of free terraforming.

However, we’re doing this not only on gamma islands, but on all alpha and beta islands too. The only difference is that on alphas and betas new mineral fields can only spawn on passable terrain, but on gammas they can spawn anywhere on the island, and you will have to terraform your way to them (this is a change since the terraforming blogpost). Our intention with this is to make the process of scanning for minerals more meaningful, maybe even to the point of turning it into a profession in itself, as opposed to the current system where you just need to find and map out all the fixed mineral fields and return to them like they were some kind of candy dispensers.

Now, with the need for constant geoscanning for new fields you may think that it would be a very tedious task with the available tools, and you’re right. That’s why we’re replacing area-based geoscanner charges with brand new directional scanning charges. These will show you the direction to the nearest tile holding the charge-specific mineral, but not the distance. It’s somewhat similar to artifact scanning, but it will require different tactics. Notice I wrote “nearest tile”: it’s equally possible that it will guide you to a tiny residue, or to a tile which is part of a large field. Once you’ve found your spot, you can use the good old tile-based scanner to find out whether you hit the jackpot or not. In the long run, this system will require miners to do a “clean job”, as randomly scattered residual spots will soon make directional scans less and less efficient.

This ties into the generation of new mineral fields: the system periodically checks the overall amount of minerals on each island, and if this gets under a certain threshold value, a new mineral field will be generated in a random spot. However, if the mineral map of an island gets too much fragmented by haphazard mining practices, the spawning of new fields will probably slow down, since the overall mineral amounts will be there, but scattered all around the island in lots of low-yield tiles.

We’re also changing the mining process itself: the current method of storing “mining cycles” in ground tiles will be converted to a more straightforward system. Tiles will hold the exact amount of minerals you can get out of them, so there won’t be a “loss” of minerals when someone with less advanced equipment or extensions mines them; he/she will just simply extract less over time, without wasting any potentially minable minerals during the process.

New minerals, factional redistribution

So far there hasn’t been much difference in the availability and usage of minerals and commodities among the three factions. Of course we’ve tried to make specific minerals more abundant than others, but this was a fragile balance, as the components used for manufacturing didn’t have such separation among the faction technologies. With the coming expansion we’re taking a big step to stir up this uniformity.

Factional differences for raw minerals

Each of the three factions will have one distinct mineral that is representative in their specific technology. For Pelistal this will be Silgium, a brand new minable raw mineral, for Nuimqol it’s Imentium, and for Thelodica it’s Stermonit.

Titan and HDT will have a role as common basic minerals used by all factions, and Titan will be reinstated to Beta, but these two will be still more abundant on Alpha islands.

In the high-end mineral department, Epriton and Noralgis will be accompanied by a new mineral available only on gamma islands. At first this will be used for building higher tier PBS structures, but in the future it will be required for new robots and equipment as well.

Furthermore, faction-specific minable and harvestable minerals will be distributed in a way that each faction will have certain minerals that are not available on their islands, at all. The aim of this system is to stimulate trade and transport between islands, while avoiding monopolies. This is how it looks:

Silgium and Triandlus: available on Pelistal and Thelodica islands, but not present on Nuimqol islands

Imentium and Helioptris: available on Nuimqol and Pelistal islands, but not present on Thelodica islands

Stermonit and Prismocitae (yes, it’s finally harvestable): available on Thelodica and Nuimqol islands, but not present on Pelistal islands

Commodity types and component diversity

Of course if we differentiate raw minerals this way, we also need to do the same for the commodities that they are refined to, and consequently it will be also reflected in the equipment they are used in.

Common basic commodities: Titanium, Plasteosine, and 2 new commodities

Commodities will also get categorized by their role in manufacturing. This can be either basic component, offensive/weaponry component, defensive/armor component, or electric/energy component. Besides bringing more immersion into the game, this should also make it easier to remember what components you generally need for a type of module, and it should also help industrialists in specializing in a specific type of equipment. Both faction and type will be displayed on the icon of commodities.

All this juggling with the components has the consequence that pretty much every robot and module will require completely different commodities compared the current setup on the live server. We did this in a way that the final price of things generally shouldn’t be too much different than what you’re used to, but be aware that there will be some changes. There is an intended “trend” too, namely that robots will require slightly more materials than before, and modules slightly less.

Is your head spinning yet? Well we’re not stopping here, it’s time for some Hungarian Maths™!

Recalculating the industry - the new facility point system

One major issue with how the current industry in Perpetuum works is its rather bad scaling: novice manufacturers have a very hard time keeping up with veteran industrialists, and the main reason for this is the tremendous gap between their efficiency. This makes it near impossible for beginners to have at least a small chance at providing goods at competitive prices.

Of course, experienced manufacturers with high-tech facilities and tools should always keep their leading edge, but we’d like to lessen that efficiency gap and at the same time make the entry into the industry a less painful experience.

This is where our newest obsession comes into picture, convergent functions, or the term you’re probably more familiar with: diminishing returns. (I say obsession because it’s something we plan to apply to various other parts of the game in the future as well.)

Simply speaking, we’re turning all the facility-related calculations into the same point based diminishing system like the way armor resistances work for robots. Facility base efficiencies, your related extensions, your faction relation, etc. will all have a point equivalent and the sum of these points will be your final efficiency. Like in the case of armor resistances, this point value can be converted into a percentage value, which will always converge towards 100% efficiency, but it will never reach it. And similarly, the more efficient you are, the more harder it will be to improve on it.

The graph on the right should help you understand it better. When accumulating production points (horizontal axis), it’s relatively easy to reach a good efficiency, but it will gradually get harder to really stand out. Factory efficiency for example starts at 150% time and material needs (compared to “perfect” efficiency), and closes to 100% from upwards. The recycling plant’s efficiency starts at 25%, and the more it closes to 100%, the more commodities you will get from items. The money you have to pay at the repair shop begins at 75% and converges to 0%, but will never reach it.

The system makes the current level-classification of facilities obsolete, as their efficiency will be measured in production points from now on. For “fixed” (NPC controlled) alpha and beta terminals this won’t make a real difference, but in the case of gamma islands where you can attach any number of facilities and facility upgrades to the main terminals, it can be any number in between (and over!) the old level equivalents, too. Of course these points will still be displayed in the terminal information windows, so you can easily compare them from anywhere in the world.

CTs and production in the new system

Calibration templates (CTs) deserve their own paragraph here: their efficiency will be also measured in production points, but the hard limit we had at 100% in the old system is completely gone. The point system makes this possible, because as I explained earlier, the overall production points “thrown” into the pipeline can be quite a lot, but your calculated efficiency still won’t ever reach 100%.

Since the limit for improving CTs doesn’t exist anymore, you will be able to combine CTs in the new gamma-only calibration complex (mentioned in the 3rd part of the PBS blog) infinitely. But remember that it’s only production points what you’ll be combining there - the final efficiency in the factory will always boil down to something less than 100%. This also means that there will be a point where combining two CTs will gain you such a small efficiency increase that it won’t be worth to do it any further.

The production point system also has a nice peculiarity: since efficiencies start to get better already at lower point values, it’s enough to have a really good CT to reach satisfactory results even without access to high-level facilities. Similarly, if you have very good industrial extensions, you can get away with mediocre CTs and facilities, and so on. But the important part is that there will always be some room for improvement.

The manufacturing process itself will also change a bit. First off, factories will not just provide a boost to production times, but they will again have their own material efficiency bonuses. Second, the currently separated cycle and quantity in the factory will be merged into one, and CTs will be degraded with every item production cycle. To compensate for this, CTs will degrade much less in these cycles, and we have also boosted the extension that controls the maximum number of manufacturable items in one slot at a time to 10 per level (so 100 at level 10).

There are still a lot of small details I didn’t cover, but this is already getting too long again, and we’ll also happily answer any specific questions in the comments below, should you have any.

But wait, there is more

Still, there are two things that are not directly industry-related, but they are important enough to share with you.

One. Scarab Mk2. 900U cargo space. Needs gamma minerals to build.

Two. Navigation extension is dead. Since speed is such an important aspect of the game, it has always been a must-have extension for everyone, which is bad game design practice. It will get removed and everyone will have “level 10” by default.

TL;DR

Fixed mineral spawns replaced by random fields

Area scanning replaced by directional scanner

Minerals, commodities, and components redistributed among factions, with the intention of creating diversity and inducing trade and transport

New gamma-only mineral and commodities used for PBS and future stuff

Production point system - completely new industry calculations using diminishing returns, for lessening the gap between beginner and veteran industrials, while still retaining the possibility for the “leading edge”

Scarab Mk2 \o/

Navigation extension gets removed, everyone will have full speed by default

Oh, I almost forgot: all of this will come together with Player-Built Settlements, and as most of it is already done, you'll be able to test it on the public test server soon.

4 Obi Wan Kenobi

Interesting changes. The mineral location changes i welcome & think is a step in the right direction.
But i do have some reservations about the change from cycles per tile to actual ore count per tile. So long as a reasonable skilled Riv driver can get a similar amount of ore per tile then i see no issue. but if its big difference then that will be a problem.

Other wise im very much looking forward to seeing this on the test server. Trying to keep an open mind about it :)

8 Arga

9 Ville

Arga, the casual player who comes home has 45 mins to an hour to play when he gets home from work, before family time, now instead of mining for a sequer load of something he now has to "find" the field and hope its not patch work. I promise you after two attempts to find fields that are not ravaged, hes going to either a) run out of time or b)say hmm, least I can warp to an astroid belt.

12 Eng Daniel

13 Tux

I welcome these changes. I think you Devs are going in the right direction here. For too long this game has been more about brute force methods (get 20 riv’s to kill a few fields that are in the same place every week) rather than provoking people to use their heads. I think the mineral field changes are good and will make the industry profession more of a profession and worthwhile for those of us who enjoy it. Industry is not for everyone and for those who do enjoy hunting for fields and robbing them of their treasure I think this is just the right thing. For all the lazy people who look at mining as beneath them and it should be easy and a mindless task to do I don’t have any sympathy for them.

Keep up the good work looking forward to the test server.

A few questions:
When combining (assuming maxed skills and relation) CT’s their efficacy you said will never be above 100% so if I combine two CT’s one at 70 and one at 60 percent will it show their eff at 130% but only run at 99.99%? or will it show 99.99% ?

I may have missed it but there was no mention of liquizit did Silgium replace it or is it going to be a common mineral?

Will accuracy of the geoscanner have anything to do with the amount or minerals shown on the tile? Or will the scans now be 100% because you are giving us the exact amount in each tile?

14 Obi Wan Kenobi

15 Ludlow Bursar

Otherwise, interesting. First impressions are that this could eventually lead to more casual indy corps, more 'stuff' on the market and big corps buying 'stuff' instead of building it - even if the reason for buying it is to turn into higher tiers.

17 Shaedys

Tux, CT's will no longer be at 70% and 60%, they'll be at 70 and 60 points.
If you combine them maybe you get one at 130 points(assuming gains points are linearly combined which I would doubt).
That gets you a few % points of efficiency gain as you can see in the graph.

19 Mark Zima

Mining is a horrible chore now. High EP miners are fucked, because actual mining time is greatly reduced. Mining is all about running around and getting nothing in return (like the 2 worst activities ingame - missions and artifacting).

High EP builders are basically asked to leave. Their 10 lvl in production extensions and 6+ industrial standing are worth shit now.

Industry is being concentrated on alpha, "you can get good results without high level facility access" lol.
Because pvp is for lunatics, right? And they don't need any meaning to it in the form of _real_ industry on beta/gamma (in % of worldwide output). And let's not forget about crippled tp network...

Racial combat balance (one of the few things done right) goes down the toilet, because races are inequal by external factors now. Players can't choose races freely without severely limiting themselves wrt where they can live, what corp they can join...

Also, do you know what happens to the live server when test goes online? It will just die (not like it has much life now). I guess it's planned? New server, new people, old encumbered micro population (200 ppl) is irrelevant...

PS. if you only see QQ above, grow some eyes. These are valid concerns.

20 Lucius Marcellus

I don't have a lot of time now so...
1) I assume as both factories + refinery (indirectly) give ME bonus now, this further boosts producing at beta/gamma?
2) Does the gamma-CT plant work linearly?
3) Is relation still as important for manufacturing (in terms of ME)?
4) Hydrobenol will now require Epriton?
5) How does the gamma decoder facility work?

22 Inda

23 Kampf Maus

Everything that improves the beginners experience is much needed.
But the more and more extensions are affected by your change, the more you should consider a full ep reset, for not driving away the veterans.
For example:
How are extensions affected that increase the amount of ore mined every cycle? They are (almost) interchangeable then with extensions that reduce the cycle time.

24 Mark Zima

In a squad discussion about mineral disparity a good idea was born: make gamma islands central and alphas peripherical (and beta inbetween, I guess).

It makes no sense to have all the sandbox features limited to islands that are in effect resource appendices/pvp reservations devoid of any (industrial/trade/eprire building/etc) meaning.

That will make many things right that are broken by design now. Ofc it will also require some changes to travel systems and zone safety.
(Like the ability to build long range teleports, highways and police towers.)

25 Mark Zima

Also, the ultimate empire building achievement (sandbox ftw right?) should be turning a good chunk of gamma into a pvp-free zone (like alpha) for industry to prosper and trade hubs to form. Of course by the means of player actions. And undoable. And certainly worth fighting for.

26 DEV Zoom

Tux:
"if I combine two CT’s one at 70 and one at 60 percent will it show their eff at 130% but only run at 99.99%? or will it show 99.99% ?"

CTs won't have percentages anymore, only production points. If you combine two CTs with 60 and 70 points, you'll get a CT with 70+(60/3)+x (x coming from a related extension), so somewhere around 110-115 points. When putting a CT into the factory, its poins will get added to the facility base points, your points coming from your extensions etc, and the final sum of points will result in a percentage value that converges towards 100% efficiency but never reaches it.

To get these production points somewhat in perspective, a CT with 150 points is really good already, then you can get a maximum of 120 points from extensions, 50 points from 10.0 relation, 125 points from the most advanced factory's base efficiency, and additional 150 points when 5 facility upgrades are attached to it. This adds up to around 590 points, or a 107.19% material efficiency (meaning you only need 7.2% more materials than perfect efficiency) which is already off the scale of my graph above and can be considered really really good.

"I may have missed it but there was no mention of liquizit did Silgium replace it or is it going to be a common mineral?"

Oh indeed, forgot about poor liquizit. It will be a common mineral required in many commodities.

"Will accuracy of the geoscanner have anything to do with the amount or minerals shown on the tile? Or will the scans now be 100% because you are giving us the exact amount in each tile?"

In the case of tile-based scans, the result noise coming from low scanning accuracy will stay the same in the new system too. For directional scanners, the direction itself will have some inaccuracy as well. Only universal (single-tile) scanning charges will be able to tell you the exact mineral amounts on that tile.

Ludlow Bursar:
"No mention of kernals and research so I guess this remains unchanged?"

Yes, the kernel and knowledge system won't change for now.

Zortarg Calltar:
"with alpha and beta terminals the standing is affecting your facility efficiencies. how will this be on gamma, cause the outpost owner will be not a npc faction."

Your own gamma facilities will simply work as if you had +10.0 relation, so they will provide the full +50 points bonus mentioned above. This also works if the facility owner sets another corporation to "good" or "friendly" relation (but not the other way around of course), in which case they will get the same bonus in that facility as if they had 5.0 or 10.0 relation.

28 Lucius Marcellus

29 Lucius Marcellus

And also:
6)Why are there no factional beta/gamma only ores? (repeating for numbering)
7) When can we expect this patch? Together with gammas, or later on?
8) Can MKII CTs be combined?
9) As you confirmed the change to hydrobenol, will there be any other changes to the ore-ratio or additions to the other commodities?
10) Do CTs at a higher point level degrade more after making a module than a low point one? (in terms of points)

30 DEV Zoom

Lucius:
missed 1) before: yes.
6) I assume the reason for factional beta/gamma only ores would be conflict/trading.
I'll be paraphrasing DEV Alf here: a lack of resources doesn't generate conflict, people do. It may work for a while, but sooner or later someone will achieve monopoly, and as time goes it will only get harder and harder to tip the scale. We end up with as many large powerblocks as the number of unique faction minerals.

That said, there will be some opportunity mineral conflict, as the three factional alpha minerals will have the same distribution on all islands, gamma included. Gamma corporations will have to decide whether they organize long range transports from safe islands, or just pay the neighbouring other faction gamma island a visit.

7) together with gammas/pbs, as mentioned at the end of the post :)
8) yes
9) yes, too many to list :)
10) yes, since it's a multiplication, larger values will lose more per cycle

31 Lupus Aurelius

It sounds like it is being made MORE complex to actually produce product. And to actually obtain the minerals. ATM, we know where fields are, go out, tile scan it, mine. Once it is found, all you have to do is go back to it and check replenishment. Now, we will have to hunt for fields over and over.

All these changes seem to add alot of time to do what currently is very grind intensive. It's not as bad as EVE yet, but it is getting there.

This is a game, it is suppose to be fun, don't make the same mistake as EVE and make it into a second job, where 90% of the time you have to "work" to spend 10% of your time having fun...

32 DEV Zoom

Lupus: I guess that really depends on one's definition of fun. If fun for you means to mindlessly go back and forth to the same mining spot over and over again then yes, I imagine this must be indeed bad news for you.

33 Lupus Aurelius

no, i don't. But having to spend lets say half an hour of game time just trying to find the ore i need, over and over again, takes that much more of my "play time" and turns it into "work time". And that half hour, or 15 mins even, daily, it that much less time i have to mine per night, unless i stay on more to compensate.

36 DEV Zoom

Lupus: I'm not sure you have to compensate for anything. Less or more mining time here is quite relative. The change will affect everyone, not just you, and the time everyone is willing to put into the game will stay the same. If the global output of minerals will change, it will change globally.

37 Ville

It's not MINDLESS travel, we max our extensions out to do the least amount of effort with the maximum amount of gain, thats what spending EP is for. We as a player base do not want to play ring and round the find the f*cking field for 30 mins before we can actually mine. We have these fields mapped out so we can go there get it done, produce the items.

1) Now onto the real problem, I have a highly specialized account for mining, am I going to get a full reset to be able to mine the materials that will no longer be available to me?

2) Do you think Islands are actually going to trade with one another? No. We are just going to stick riveler MK2 fleets on Alpha islands massacuring all the alpha one/two fields and haul them in ourselves.

3) Is the Test server going to be selective invite only? If the entire general public is moved to the test server for a week the live server will be like a ghost town.

41 Ludlow Bursar

I like the mining changes, the aim is to make mining into a profession and stimulate the market. The time spent searching is compensated by buffed fields. If you can't be arsed to mine now that it requires a bit of searching then buy minerals instead.

42 Shaedys

Zoom:
Bots take an amount of materials to make, being self sufficient you mine the raw materials to make the bots you need to go out and pvp, where with us the PVP is considered the fun part. If you add overhead to the mining through more scanning, then you have less time to go out and have that fun. The scanning down of fields takes time, it creates overhead on the mining and thereby increases the amount of time before you have the equipment built. Reducing the amount of time you have for fun. Now I would like scanning more than sitting on a spot and mining. My suggestion would then be to keep the overall time spent on the industrial part the same. Increase the mining yield(or decrease the material cost of equipment) to compensate the time it takes to now scan down the fields. The time to scan down fields can be found out on the test server. For an average mining session you could take an hour(or two).

43 Mr Starey

1) Will the EP spent in skills that increase yield-per-cycle be returned and will industrial bot bonuses be changed to remove the "Mined amount increase" bonus, or is it just going to be about speed mining until a tile is empty, a la EVE's asteroids?

2) Are the different charges for different ores going to remain, or will they be combined to universal charges to streamline scanning and mining? Perhaps the advanced charges could remain, and give bonuses to yield when used on the correct minerals.

44 DEV Zoom

I understand that scanning creates an overhead, but it's part of the game and it was intended to do so from the very beginning. Right now scanning is only part of the game until you put a waypoint on all the fields. Hell, we could have made all the mineral fields visible for everyone and remove scanning for good, it wouldn't have made much of a difference in terms of gameplay.

45 Qwertyboom

An EP Reset is badly needed for this patch. Some players have really fine tuned there skills, for mining and production. IE. You have specialized a lot of ep for 1 mineral, now your on an island that doesnt even have it.. wasted ep. Many people i have spoken with in game have all agreed that an ep reset is the correct way to go. So Zoom is that in the cards, or are you just screw it up and leave us as is. And secondly i agree with the others who have said moving mineral fields around sucks, now we have to waste time to find the fields, bad idea.

49 Arga

Also, to elaborate on the fuffy factor. If the game is going to support trade of materials, it has to be fiscally worthwhile to do it. Risk aside, if I can sell 720U of ore at Tellesis at .6 NIC for ~8M NIC or haul it 40 minutes elsewhere, and sell it for 12M, that 4M NIC profit has to be worth the additional 40 min. of time. In the case of mining, it's not, meaning I can make more then 4M NIC in 40 minutes if I just kept mining instead of pulling that character off the field to run the scarab.

As for faction material. The same issue, if someone else is going to haul it to my local outpost, there going to charge a premium, if I buy it from the remote outpost, I still have to haul it. It's going to be more cost effective for me to mine and haul it, then to pay a local premium; unless of course, the premium is lower because they can transport a large amount per trip.

50 Ville

51 Canthra Monero

"we’re changing the current fixed position mineral fields to random spawns, where the fields won’t get “refilled”, but new fields will appear instead, once the current ones are depleted."
So my question is this, will it be as artifacting is right now, such as when one site is removed or depleted, will another re spawn immediately or how quickly will it?

"the system periodically checks the overall amount of minerals on each island, and if this gets under a certain threshold value"

This ties in as well, what is your definition of the word periodically?

Because if it does respawn immediately everyone should be happy as hell because this means an island cannot be mined out. So essentially we will have the ability to mine huge amounts more than we can now.

52 Lucius Marcellus

53 DEV Zoom

Canthra: periodical check means every few hours, I don't know exactly. Every time the check finds out that the overall mineral count on an island is less than the desired minimum, it will generate a new field.

54 Crepitus

@Arga or you can just run combat which apparently most people are doing now for money instead of ANYTHING else.

@Dev Zoom I agree with most of what Ville and Lupus have posted. We deserve full resets since, at least on the surface, it appears that you are in fact adding even more grind to production and making many current industrial character set ups undesirable.

As for your post about "we could have just made the minerals visible to everyone and had no scanning" I'd rather see that than lose my hours upon hours of scanned waypoints and be stuck with what will now apparently be a gimped hybrid character instead of an actually good miner.

I'm trying very hard not to be insulting or disrespectful because I know that you guys put a lot of work in to this. However one has to ask if you guys have ever actually played the industry side with some of what you're doing.

It seems like every time we get something awesome like PBS you nerf something else in to the ground to compensate and everything stays bittersweet.

56 Arga

Was every couple hours a arbitrary check? 2 hours maybe fast enough, but it's something to keep an eye on, since vet miners can devestate fields quickly, maybe hourly would be better. Assuming that the timer isn't a mechanism to control mineral availablity.

57 Arga

@Crep, indeed combat pays better, but unless they do provide a reset, its not really an optional NIC source for a miner; although my combat can drive a scarab, so the point is still valid, as he can certaily make more NIC/hour farming then hauling.

59 Arga

60 Tux

For all of the whiners: if you don’t like to mine don’t do it its simple, if you need stuff to go pvp buy it from the miners who do like to mine and sell their products on the market. There has been a general idea that for some reason one person should be able to do and make everything they need to play the game. If one person can do and make everything they need what the hell is this game doing in the MMO space? This is a MMO because people need to interact with each other and in some ways depend on others. There are different “professions” that enjoy doing different things if you prefer shooting things kill NPS’c for plasma, sell plasma, buy mods and bots.

I fully agree with the changes and think they will make the game more diverse. One thing I very much like is that it will curb the idea that one corp/player will be self sufficient and make the market a bigger part of the game.

There is no need for an EP reset because any char spec’ed in one mineral will still be able to mine that mineral, maybe not on the island of their choice but it is still a possible for them to mine it.

If I m correct the changes will mean more minerals on all islands because they will be refreshed quicker than they are now, so if you are someone who likes to mine you will be able to mine out more fields of the same mineral in one day that under the current system.

62 Obi Wan Kenobi

63 DEV Zoom

"There has been a general idea that for some reason one person should be able to do and make everything they need to play the game."

This is something I can't get my head around either. People even go as far as saying that having multiple accounts is a MUST, because otherwise you can't cover all the duties and professions yourself. We try to implement more profession opportunities into the game, and in turn we regularly get feedback that we are balancing the game so that you can only play properly with multiple accounts, hence we are greedy bastards. Sorry for the offtopic rant, but meh :)

66 Domono

Oh the things I could say to people who feel entitled to "do it all in one".

Any way, I like the changes myself. The directional scan is a bit odd but I get it. People do need to understand if they are pressed for time they can break out their trading trading skills and buy materials versus getting it themselves. Yes this does indeed cut into profits but the idea is you will be gaining more materials than you could get for yourself thus being able to produce greater amounts of product.

71 Obi Wan Kenobi

*looks at his 750k ep* .... *looks at dev blog* I think ill still be keeping my stupidly high skills no matter what. sure some now might be less effective but im still far better off than some new guy lol.

:smugdog: *lights cigar & pours another whisky*

72 Crepitus

By fragmenting the commodities and ores by faction, destroying persistent ore locations, and nerfing the efficiency of skills I can no longer do that solo (although at the moment I don't need to thanks to EHARM being so awesome).

I then have no need for industry accounts since the only reason I ever had them was to support myself.

Without a reset they just sit there useless or I have to do far more work than it's worth to try to get minerals/commodities that I used to have unfettered access to.

Being that I already have limited play time, this extra grind is unacceptable. I will definitely not go that route, instead the accounts will go dark and

I'll stay on combat until you do the same shit to that system ---> then I'll probably just leave the game again, without keeping my accounts active.

Considering that the population is so low that you actually took your graphs showing how many were online down, probably because they were embarrassing and deterring people from playing a "dead" game, you guys should be some serious thought in to stuff like this before it's implemented.

It's easy to give people stuff they want, it's really hard to take that same stuff way and expect them to stick around, I hope that AC takes that in to consideration before they ever do anything at all with any change; not just these.

74 Lobo

Like I said on forums just reset all EP from Indy and mining trees leave the others alone. Maybe the Indy bot control in robot control gets a reset as well, as I think quiet a few will stop mining all together and just farm plasma.

75 Nemo

A question for the new folk. Note that I am in a corp that has beta facilities and will expand into Gamma, but I think that we must keep the game open to recruiting new blood.

Short version: what is the place of mission-related relations in th enew industry system, if any?

Industry right now requires decent Relations, which are very hard to get up with the current Mission choke points around the beginnin gof L3 missions. I am talking the present system, not what was in play a year ago.

Will new players that want to take a hand at industry be able to get their Relations to a good level, or at least to whatever level is presumed reasonable for Alpha? As far as I can see currently you have to start with Alpha Relations even if you wanted to go Beta.

Yes,I *did* read the Devblog, and if you have your own Gamma outpost(s) you will have perfect relations with yourself. But for those new folk that do nto immediately jump into Beta/Gamma corps, will they be able to get eifficeiency up, either with the new diminishing returns overlapping system, or the new points-based efficiency of terminals, or...?

76 Nemo

Oh-- and +1 to setting everyone to Nav-10 and remitting the points. Even new folks will be able to keep up (literally) with experienced players. Anything that lets new and old play better together can only help subscriptions. (Yes, Nav-10 was my first 10.)

Incidentally-- are you actually doing this by "setting a phantom skill to 10", or by eliminating the modifier and raising bot/mech speed? Presumably the effects of velocity Nexus will not change.

78 DEV Zoom

Nemo: since they don't have access to advanced facilities, it's reasonable to say that for Alpha-based industrialists, the definitive contributing factor in their efficiency will be high level extensions.

Relations didn't play such a critical role so far either, and this won't change in the new system. As I mentioned in one of my comments above, a maxed out relation will only equal to 50 points in the big picture. (Although 50 points can still mean a lot if that's your only source of points!)

What we're counting on regarding new players, is that they can easily gather a little bit of everything: extensions, some relations, satisfactory CTs, etc., and the sum of these will result in a relatively competitive efficiency.

79 DEV Zoom

Oh and maybe I should have mentioned this in the first place: directional scanners won't have a range limit. If there is one tiny bit of mineral on the other end of the island, it will point you in that direction.

80 Nemo

I think that was implied, re the scanners, Zoom. However, the newer folks will already have a bit of a hassle hauling goods back from 15-minute-depletion cans. Having to roam around may exacerbate the problem.

Also, with no way of telling the size of the deposit, there would not seem to be a way to set it to ignore one with only three tiles of decent stuff in favour of one further away, with 50 tiles?

Is it an omnidirectional scan, or can you force some sorting by only aiming on a 90-degree wedge, for example?

81 Nemo

Dev Zoom (quote): "What we're counting on regarding new players, is that they can easily gather a little bit of everything: extensions, some relations, satisfactory CTs, etc., and the sum of these will result in a relatively competitive efficiency." (end quote)

If that actually works out, it would, indeed, be a big step forward for the newer players.

It will be interesting to see what combination of extension, to what levels, will be necessary to get a good combination of these factors. Building up "points from a bunch of different sources, if it requires a lot of disparate extensions taken to high levels, would also be a problem for those who don't have a huge pile of EP.

As long as the new system doesn't make it much worse on the newbies, you should still get more new accounts. "Diminishing returns", if properly applied, slow down the high end, which is what the Devblog suggested.

82 DEV Zoom

It's omnidirectional, there is no way to limit it. If a small deposit is interfering with your plans then you need to mine that one first or get further away from it so the scan picks up another location.

85 DEV Zoom

86 Nemo

I realise that for many, these "MMOs" are completely mechanistic, and people could care less about the "backstory". Being, amongst other things, a writer, I enjoy background for an MMO that "makes sense". I had noticed that certain types of minerals spawned in certain types of terrain, and the flavour text for some goes so far as to imply that they are generally found together, or near certain things. This promoted a small amount of "in-game perceived realism".

Is this all being thrown out, or might we expect that the spawn points will be "random within a certain set of parameters"? As an example, a certain substance is still usually found near terraced hillsides, even if it may move around that area in future?

I suppose that, since some minerals are going to be restricted by faction colour of islands, that is already an artificiality, but it would be nice if some of the stuff still made "in-game sense".

88 Nemo

Sorry, Arga-- to which post does this relate? The omnidirectional scanning one?

If so, yes, people leaving rotten spots to screw up others' mining scanning could become an issue. If it did, I would imagine there would be a storm of posts on the forums. ;) It would then hopefully be addressed.

89 DEV Zoom

I'm aware there are some perceived rules that make players think that some current mineral fields are in special locations, but it's simply coincidence, I'm not aware of any serious planning there.

The new mineral generation system will also be completely random, but later we may of course have a look at how it could be made more interesting or realistic. Maybe something based on the heightmap. Then again, that would interfere again with terraforming, because players would be forced to keep some high mountains just to keep those minerals spawning (and could be exploited too).

As you said, many people don't care about lore and backstory. Sensible and fun game mechanics stand in first place for us too - lore can be bent around that however we want. That said, a proper backstory is very important even so, it's what breathes soul into the game. We can and should definitely improve a lot in that department.

90 Arga

We were assuming in our talk, both omni-directional and unlimited distance.

The real point, is it's no extra effort on the part of the miner, they can mine out the area, and just stop short a few cycles on the last tile (or just leave a tile).

In order for this to make sense, you have to take into account that most players will want to minimize their scan times, meaning most will do a scan under the outpost.

While its true, the new spawn may acutally show up 'closer' and be a good direction to go, its more likely that the 'close' spawns will get fragmented and require players to undock and go much further to do their first scan then they would like. Same will be true around TPs.

This is more an issue with 5 or 6 players making a coordianted effort, not the random solo miner occasionally leaving residue.

91 Nemo

92 Arga

Sure, a good samaritan may, for awhile, clear out a few fragmented tiles, but just through carelessness, limited mining times, or directed effort, scanning for a single tile's worth of material is just asking for trouble.

But, I see the problem. If the scan doesn't find single tiles, then there's really no way anyone would ever bother clearing those fragmented tiles. While depending on the kindness of stranger's may have worked for Blanche, its not such a good game mechanic.

93 DEV Zoom

Thing is, it's not just the good samaritans, it's in everyone's interest. Those leaving residual tiles are not only working against the others, but themselves too. Will they come to the forums crying because they made a poopoo?

95 Mr Starey

As far as I can see, from what the Devs have posted so far, leaving tiles unmined, or only partially mined will keep the total density of that particular ore on that particular island higher, which will slow down respawn for all concerned.

So hey, go ahead if you want to own a beta or gamma island, but if you want to mine on alpha, you're only going to hurt yourself in the long run and, tbh, given the amount of vets and newbies alike who mine solely on alpha, I seriously doubt that it will be a problem on the core islands.

I don't like the faction segmenting, but apart from that I think the changes are good. Anything that changes the status quo and shakes up the current order of things can only be good for a sandbox game. You can't just create an intial rule set and then stay within it for the life span of the game, because then you stagnate. With a sandbox, there has to be evolution, there has to be expansion, and there has to be change.

As an old interweb friend of mine once said, evolve or die. Those older players with specced miners need to realise that those toons haven't lost ANY of their usefulness. What has changed is that those players have to work harder to get the maximum out of their characters. If that's too hard for you then, quite frankly, fuck off.

97 DEV Zoom

98 Duma

@DEV Zoom,
Looking forward to trying this on the test server. So that we can run our own numbers lol :)

Question, you state that the server checks for levels of ore every 10 mins or so and if below a certain amount it spawns a new field somewhere. So other than annoying people and leaving ore fields not cleared, what happens in the case of us clearing a field and this "respawn" occurs. Does that mean the field we are on vanishes?

The Nav-10 removal is brilliant for new and old players. thanks for listening to us, well us from back 12 months ago lol :)

The removal of certain ore for the different coloured islands is interesting. That may change some dynamics of the game, justhave to see where "we" take it huh?

Question: Will all materials for equipment/bots be revised with this patch? i.e. Green islands should have all resources for green type equipment like missile launchers IMHO.

Lastly, whens the test server coming? ETA?

Thanks

Duma

99 DEV Zoom

"what happens in the case of us clearing a field and this "respawn" occurs. Does that mean the field we are on vanishes?"

It won't vanish of course, when the server checks for total mineral amount on the island, it only generates a new field when the amount gets below a set threshold, but it doesn't take away anything. Imagine that you have a mug of beer, and the bartender always fills it up when he sees that it's only half full again :)

The check itself won't happen every 10 mins though, that would be a waste of server processing power, more like a few hours, maybe a day will be enough. I doubt there are enough people to stripmine an island in a day.

"Will all materials for equipment/bots be revised with this patch?"

Yes, the component list of nearly all items will change.

"Lastly, whens the test server coming? ETA?"

The closest estimate is early May, hopefully we'll have something more precise next week.

107 Nemo

Regarding EP for mining/industry. Well, this can be argued in many different directions.

Sadly, the people that may get most affected would be those that had "recently" gotten to high levels, if they cannot benefit before a change happens that seriously affects the skill dynamic. One could always argue that some that had already benefitted for half of the game's life need not feel as hard done by.

Problem is, who gets to define what is "recently"?

Fairest-- only in my own opinion-- is that the Devs need to evaluate how far-reaching and impacting the changes are. If they really change the value emphasis for certain skills and extensions, then perhaps a few downgrade tokens would make sense, or simply a reset of those Extension categories affected-- likely Industry and/or Extraction.

Yes, I know that my opinion is favouring the players who have been in this game longer than I have, but I do not mind that-- they have also kept it alive. ;)

If, on the other hand, the Devs truly feel that the changes do not render any path so much less profitable or enjoyable that a change is warranted, then they can leave the Extensions as they are and see how seriously people feel about it.

108 Inspiration

I like the direction of nearly all these changes, with maybe the exception of:

* Combining CTs (or was it decoders) only on Gamma.
* I ain't sure if the new method of ore location is that pleasant. Maybe if we did not have to change scan charges and could get a generic abundance reading over a wide area, it could work. But having a very tiny amount 5 tiles closer divert you from a much larger pool of ore seems nonsensical to me.

As I said, overall i like things pretty much.

As compensation to those that heavily spend EP based on the current industry and mining mechanics, you could offer a partial reset for these skill groups (via limited time skill downgrade period maybe). It will help to increase specialization in the population!

As a wise poster said....if you don't like to mine, leave it to the specialists that do and do what you yourself excel at and find fun. The market exists to exchange the benefits of everyones playtime results. And prices will reflect people value these efforts!

109 Dan

110 Crepitus

@DEV Zoom: "We as a player base do not want to play ring and round the find the f*cking field for 30 mins before we can actually mine."

Replace "mine" with "PvP" and I hope you'll see where this is going. Everyone is always against the dumbing down of the game, but when we actually make something less of a grind, it becomes a chore?

^^
Please explain how *ANY* of the changing mechanics make *ANYTHING* less of a grind. I see nothing but increasing times to do everything in game that I need to support PvP, which is the part of the game I enjoy the most and if I could, the only part I'd play.

This is the most true in industry, with fragmenting factions and random ores - and industry is already the grindiest activity I've ever experienced in any game ever in my 27 or 28 years or so of being a gamer (yea, I'm in my 30's and most of P's audience are adults), and I'm counting writing custom .bat boot menus with different config.sys's on a per game basis so they were actually playable back in DOS and other things of that ilk (aka, endless hours of tedium before I could Play the Game).

Research is untouched. Lol.

111 DEV Zoom

In my book, grind equals doing very basic actions over and over again. The new system with random fields should bring the unknown factor back into the game and so make it somewhat less of a grind and more (with the lack for a better word) adventurous.

But I can see that anything that takes longer to do means more grind for you. Surely we could make it so that you only need to push a button inside the terminal and it will give you a bunch of minerals so that you don't even have to mine. Oh actually we have that, it's called the market.

As other players have already mentioned above, you don't really have to scan or mine if you don't like it. We have included trading in the game with the intention that you won't have to do everything by yourself, but leave it to those who do like doing those.

I don't know, maybe it's our fault for allowing everyone to train for every profession, somehow "forcing" them do to just that. Then again, if we wouldn't, the players with this mindset would feel the need for multiaccounting even more than now I'm afraid.

114 DEV Zoom

You won't know whether a directional scan is "terrible", you only know that once you do a tile scan in the area where it points to. If it really turns out terrible then you have to walk away from it so the directional scan picks up another location.

117 Inda

To Ville, I see you wont need, or couldnt do, scanning with Riveler Mk2, just go out with Argano Mk2 and find a "good" spot just than go out the Riveler(s), something similiar than artifacts scanning and Observer hunting.

To Crepitus, the farming in the last period of game more worth than before because of epriton price downing and, T4 equipment prica also downing, so I hope the "equation" will be more after Gamma, PBS, Terraforming patch so you just can go out farm to do same money as you did by mining, If you like better farming this is your way. Or why you need mine if it is boring to you and not rewarding?

119 DEV Zoom

Sid: yes they can be traded via direct trading only. The market is not suitable for items with unique properties.

Even if you could trade them on the market, it would probably be a big scamfest, since obviously you couldn't know where the mineral is before you buy the result. With direct trading at least you know who you're dealing with.

121 DEV Zoom

Sid: right, terribly sorry, apparently it's one of those things that have been enabled in the developer client for quite some time already, and for whatever stupid reason not in the live client. The next patch will fix that.

122 Sid from mining

123 Crepitus

@DEV Zoom Yes, spending time doing tedious repetitive tasks to get to the Thing You Really Want (TM) is the definition of grind.

You openly admit that your new system will increase the time to use/market of all goods. Thanks for agreeing with me that your system introduces unnecessary grind, now please fix it before imposing it on us.

Making mining in to artifact scanning is actually removing content from the game by consolidation since they're basically the same activity from your description with the only difference being that mining will be less accurate and therefore take even more time.

The frustration is evident in your post. I agree with whoever posted above that you should be seriously gauging the response this is getting vs the response to the PBS stuff which seems to be overwhelmingly positive.

@Inda because I can do that, currently, with minimal interaction while I also run my combat account and go PvP at the same time and be effective at both. If I can no longer make good money or get all the minerals I need for corp production this play style is effectively killed dead -- I much prefer mining to farming specifically because mining requires less attention.

Also when I rolled 2 industry guys industry was paying far better than farming bots was. Subsequent changes in both the game and the political landscape have reversed that, and I only see that situation getting worse.

Also, the market sucks, the fundamental problem of people not wanting to sell to their enemies reminds untouched and I do not see these changes "kick starting" the market at all just because it's harder to get resources. The big corps will remain self-sufficient ***AT ALL COSTS***

126 Ta ta

@Crepitus: Can u please stop whining atleast to u try the system on the test sever.
U are just theorising about a system that u dont even know all the facts about.
BTW i got 2 mining accounts and they bring in a lot more nic/h than i can do farming. 50+ mill nic/h.

128 Inda

129 Annihilator

The additional infos that Zoom has postet shows that there will still be deposits that are big enough to mine extended times. For example the bright titan deposit north of TM-A on those example-screens has 151 brighter tiles then average - that means there is something between 38 and 78 million Titan ore in that one deposit...

130 Ville

@ All the try the system before bashing it people. I personally am not a person to sit back and be royal screwed over and grin and bear it. if it looks like poop, smells like poop, and it is the same consistency as poop. I call it poop.

131 Arga

We tried the 'shut-up' and try it method with walls and probes. If your one of the people that didn't spend a billion nic 'testing' them on the live server for the devs, go ahead and continue to call discussions about upcoming features QQ. For those that did, discussing how these things COULD negatively effect game play is an economical way to proceed.

The fact that Zoom chooses to respond with sarcasm... You'd think by now he'd know better then to feed the trolls.

133 Ville

Ok Obi, you want logic? I now have to artifact scan to find a "possible" mining spot. Yeah that's totally going to speed up the mining process. If you actually placed market pvp in the past or organized production on a larger scale you could easily see the ramifications of this. But judging by your lack of understanding, I deem your comments as useless.

135 ZUBO

Hmm. I have mixed feelings about this. I was planning to return to the game after this patch but now i am not so sure.

Mining will become harder(see below) so prices will likely rise, especially for the less abundant minerals, unless the required amounts for everything are reduced or mining yield increased. This of course means its harder to fund PvP (and all other) activities.

I also hope the respawn-mechanic will try to distribute the minerals evenly, otherwise you will eventually have all the mineral spots far away from outposts or near teleporters, where nobody dares to mine(on beta/gamma). Maybe the spots should be redistributed within the same "district" of the island rather than fully random.

Furthermore if you want to make scanning really meaningful should add more value to increasing the scanning extensions. An idea could be that with every level you not only increase the accuracy, but are also allowed to set "threshold values". This way if you have high extensions you could set the directional scanner to a high threshold so that you will only find "full" tiles. Or even change it so that its not not a single tile but rather a sum over a small area (5x5 tiles or something) that can be set and the range of allowed values increases with extensions. This would make scanning(extensions) really worthwhile.

The other changes are o.k. but then again i never really produced much.

136 Inspiration

If there is less mined, prises will indeed go up, if demand stays the same that is. But that does for a miner at least, not imply mean his income decreases. He gets more paid for his work after all!

I think if finding solid amounts of ORE is time consuming, only the casual and AFK miners will get hit by income decrease. To the dedicated miner, the search time can be compensated by less of the above competition and better prices.

And I like your idea for improved scanning. I can see that mechanic as a valuable extension.

137 bleu

I agree with inspiration. I also welcome all added content to the game after all it is a sandbox mmo and the more sand we have means the more options we can work with and every gets to play the way they like most

140 Sizzla

<<<<< DEV Zoom >>>>>, I would really like to hear your opinion about the fix I proposed at the end of the post

After giving it some time I quite like the changes that are happening to the industry, even though it does not really benefit me and my high production skills.

I do even like the mining changes, except for the issue of the single tile patches that can be used for throwing off scan results. When the whole island is full of them you will be almost unable to find the real spots due to all the clutter.

I think it is EXTREMELY important that mineral spots slowly degrade, based on size of surrounding patches and the time they are alive. This will fix 2 very important problems: the tiny patches that ruin the game for everyone (there is just nothing good or fun about them) and a lot of patches getting stuck in unreachable or NPC guarded spots.

I cannot understand nobody mention this solution and why the devs seem not to have considered it, its so easy, elegant and even a bit realistic (certainly for fluids).